The FBI Charged a Man Who Threatened To Attack “C*cksuckers” at the Boston Globe

On Wednesday, the FBI filed charges against a California man, 68-year-old Robert Darrell Chain, for repeatedly calling the Boston Globe newsroom and threatening to kill its reporters. According to an affidavit filed by FBI agent Thomas M. Dalton, Chain made more than a dozen threatening calls to the newsroom over a period of about 12 days in August. In several of those calls, the FBI says, Chain used homophobic slurs.

“Hey, how’s your pussy smell today, nice and fresh? We are going to shoot you motherfuckers in the head, you Boston Globe cocksuckers. Shoot every fucking one of you,” Chain allegedly told one reporter during an August 13 call.

Chain also referred to Globe employees as “f*ggots,” the FBI says, in at least one other call to the newsroom. Though he made efforts to block his phone number, the FBI used records obtained from Verizon and Charter Communications to trace the calls back to a landline at his home in Encino, California.

The shooting threats were a direct response to the Boston Globe’s mid-August call for newspapers around the country to run editorials on press freedom — an effort the Globe coordinated after President Trump repeatedly referred to the American press as “the enemy of the people.”

More than 300 newspapers participated, running editorials the week of August 13 slamming Trump’s anti-media statements. The industry-wide response was partially motivated by a mass shooting in late June that left five newsroom employees dead at Maryland’s Capital Gazette. After the shooting, Trump tweeted that his “thoughts and prayers [were] with the victims and their families.”

But since the Capital Gazette shooting alone, Trump has tweeted nine times calling the American press “the enemy of the people,” according to searches conducted on the Trump Twitter Archive. Most recently, he tweeted the phrase this morning — the day after the FBI filed the charges against Chain.

According to the FBI, Chain told Boston Globe employees in an August 22 phone threat, “you are the enemy of the people.” In the same phone call, Chain allegedly used the term “fake news” to describe both the Globe and the New York Times.

Dalton’s affidavit says that Chain owns several firearms, and most recently bought a new 9mm rifle in May. Chain has been charged with one count of making threatening communications in interstate commerce, and according to the Justice Department, could face up to five years in prison.

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